Compromised

by Heidi Ayarbe

  I ruffle his hair. It’s greasy and clumpy. “Me, too.” And I really mean it. “Maybe next time we come to an airport, we’ll all get on a plane.”

  Nicole snorts. “Last I heard, they don’t take hitchhikers on planes.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Yes, I’ll hold.” I wait in the phone booth. We’ve found a boarded-up building near the airport where we can spend the night. Downtown is too far to walk before dark, and we can’t risk getting caught on the streets at night.

  I lied and said I was going to look for something in the area to help keep us warm. Nicole’ll kill me if she knows I’m spending money to make a long-distance phone call.

  “I’m sorry; could you tell me your name?” a woman with a nasal voice asks.

  “Um, Beulah.” My throat is on fire. Maybe I have allergies. “Hold, please.” An instrumental version of “Dancing Queen” floods the phone line. Definitely not the kind of music I expect.

  “Hello?” His voice sounds tired. Raw.

  Silence.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?” He shouts to somebody, “Nobody’s on the line. Did you cut the call?”

  Another voice comes on the line. “Hello? Hello? Yeah, I don’t hear a thing, either.”

  “Hello?” He comes back on the line. “Are you there?”

  I listen as the seconds tick away and open my mouth. But nothing comes out.

  “Maya?” he says. “Is that you?”

  And the line goes dead.

  My head pounds. I find my way back to the warehouse. The street reeks of human waste. Small groups huddle around fires in the alleyway outside the warehouse—shadows dancing across gaunt faces. Nobody looks anybody in the eye. I weave my way in and out of small groups of teens. It’s weird. I wonder how many people are homeless in Boise.

  When we found the warehouse in the day, nobody was around. Where do kids like us stay during the day?

  I guess they’re not really like us. I mean we have a place to go. A destination.

  I find Nicole and Klondike huddled outside the entrance to the warehouse.

  “Why don’t we stay inside?” I ask.

  “There’s a body in there,” Nicole says.

  “A body?”

  “A dead one,” Klondike says. “And it’s darker than God’s pockets. Goddammit, it’s dark. Asswipes.” He lets out a long croak. A couple of kids scoot away from us. That’s a plus. It’s not like we want anybody too close.

  Maybe we should’ve kept Lucifer. Natural nutcase repellent.

  “Yeah. He’s sitting up. Cross-legged. Frozen.” Nicole describes everything about the corpse and says, “It’s like Don Vito Genovese dying in prison of a heart attack. Total downer.”

  “Don’t see the connection, Cappy.” I brace myself for another of Nicole’s totally unrelated mob stories.

  “No glory, Jeops. Some kid dying in a warehouse all alone is just like a washed-up Mafia guy with high cholesterol. Pathetic. When it’s time to go, you gotta make a statement.”

  “Capone didn’t,” I argue.

  “Capone’s nonstatement was his statement. Others, though, need more style. Go out with a bang, with purpose.”

  Like Mom, I think. I remember following her around the house in my socks so she wouldn’t hear the pitter-patter of my feet on the cold floor. I knew where she hid her bottles and pills. I’d count them each day to make sure she wasn’t taking too many. Dad pretended that everything was fine in the fairy-tale world he’d constructed.

  I feel a pang of sadness. I watch Nicole, study her. I haven’t had the chance to count her pills since we’ve been on the road. I just hope they’re all still there. Déjà-vu.

  “What?” Nicole says.

  I swallow, the pain in my throat pretty much a constant—just getting worse, depending on the time. “I don’t think it’s pathetic. I think it’s sad,” I say. “Death isn’t honor or glory or freedom. It’s not romantic. Death is nothing. The absence of presence. A gap that you can’t fill. The end,” I say.

  Klondike’s eyes open wide. “And the promise of the afterlife? Eternal light? God?”

  “Nice, Jeops,” Nicole says. “Why don’t you just tell him there’s no Santa Claus while you’re at it?”

  I cradle my head in the palms of my hands.

  Klon sniffles. “Are his eyes open?” he asks.

  Nicole nods.

  “You’ve gotta close ’em, Cappy.”

  “I’m not gonna close ’em. I’m not gonna touch him.” Nicole makes a face.

  Klon trembles, croaks, then begins to tap my leg. His eyes squint open and shut, open and shut—like one of those pond frogs with bug eyes. I’m not liking his new tic. It’s kind of disturbing.

  Klon coughs and grabs his side. “Then he’s taking someone else with him. That’s how it happens. You have to close his eyes or someone else will die. Asswipes, tallywhacker.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Nicole says, and rubs her arms.

  “He sits like Buddha,” Klondike says. “Buddha froze in the warehouse.” He taps us. “It’s darker than God’s pockets, and he’s alone. He has his eyes open, and he’s alone. He wants company.”

  I notice that a lot of the alleyway has cleared out. Few groups remain. Death is a natural repellent, too. We don’t need Lucifer as long as we have the Buddha corpse.

  “Maybe he’s meditating or something,” I finally say. “He might not be dead.”

  “In his own shit?” Nicole asks. The more she talks, the more horrified Klon looks. “That place smells like a sewer in there. I think he’s decomposing.”

  I shiver. “In this cold? He must’ve died several days ago then, if he’s already decomposing. Way past the rigor mortis stage.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know the exact time of death, Jeopardy. I didn’t bring my crime scene investigation equipment.” Nicole shakes her head. “At least we’re all biodegradable, huh? I mean he could stay there forever and just become part of the abandoned warehouse. We all could stay right here and biodegrade—only leaving a trace of brittle bones for some archaeologist to find two hundred years from now. But that would mean no glory.”

  I think for a bit. “Probably not Klon’s breast implant lady. You know it can take up to five hundred years for plastic to decompose in a landfill. We’ve found a bazillion ways to ruin the world while we’re alive, and we continue to do it postmortem.”

  Nicole looks down at her chest. “So I’m ecologically conscientious by not getting implants. Good to know I’m doing my part.” She points to the warehouse. “Anyway, they call him Limp.”

  “Limp?” I say.

  “Yeah. The guys who were sitting over there don’t know if he was Limp because he walks funny or”—Nicole points at her crotch—“limp. If you know what I mean.”

  “You asked people that?”

  “It’s a legitimate question, Jeopardy.” Nicole nods.

  “Why would you even want to know?” I ask.

  “You know what’s weird?” she says. “He can’t be much older than us, you know. Just really gross smelling and looking.”

  I look down the alley. Most of the fires have died out. It looks as if everyone is gone. When I look hard, I can see people’s feet or a stocking cap sticking out of cardboard boxes. There’s only one streetlight working just a few feet from us, its dim light casting a soft glow. It’s like this street is reserved for people like us: homeless. I clasp the locket. What do I expect from this aunt who might not even exist anymore? A miracle? A home? Family? Whatever that means.

  Hypothesis: If I find Aunt Sarah…

  I can’t complete it. Maybe I’m just too tired to think.

  Procedure:

  1) Find Main Street

  2) Find Aunt Sarah’s restaurant

  3) Ask somebody for Aunt Sarah

  4) Find Aunt Sarah

  I’ll leave the conjectures, variables, and all that other stuff for later.

  Good. I have a procedure. Just for tomorrow. That’s all I need,
though. One plan a day.

  I want to grab my backpack and sit on it. It’s nice to have cleanish jeans, and it’s not likely we’ll get to a Laundromat anytime soon. I look behind Nicole and near Klon. “Where’s our stuff?” I ask.

  “I hid it,” Nicole says.

  “Where?”

  “In the warehouse.”

  “With the dead body?”

  “Well, he’s not gonna take it.” Nicole rolls her eyes.

  “Yeah, but—”

  Nicole leans in. “We can’t be around here with nice REI backpacks. We’ll get mobbed.”

  I nod.

  “So I left them in the warehouse.”

  “Those packs are all we’ve got.”

  “Precisely,” Nicole says. “And if we want to keep them, I had to hide them. Look around you. We’re not on some high school trip where everybody compares ring tones and iPods. We’ve gotta be smart. We’re looking too clean as it is.”

  I sigh. “Maybe we can take the ten dollars and—”

  “We had a nice sleep the last couple of nights. We’re going to find your mysterious auntie Em tomorrow. So suck it up for now.”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  “It looks like we’ve got a long night ahead of us.” Nicole looks around.

  “Do we have any boxes?” I ask.

  “Does it look like it?” she asks. “A box is a prime piece of real estate around here.”

  “So who gets first shift?” I ask.

  “How about none of us sleep tonight. This place creeps me out.”

  I look over at Klondike. He’s already fallen asleep, leaning against a green plastic trash bin. His breath comes out raspy; his chest rattles.

  “He looks worse than before,” I say. My throat is burning again. Maybe we all have tonsillitis.

  “Yeah.” Nicole sits down. “Let’s sit back-to-back.”

  “Okay.” I look up. No stars are out—none that I can see through the muck in the sky. “How are we supposed to stay awake?” I’m so tired all the time. Before, I needed a nice bed to be able to sleep. Not anymore.

  “Okay. Let’s go back to those vowels.” Nicole pulls out a stubby pencil and ratty notebook. Her postcards spill out of the plastic bag.

  Gotta give her credit for one thing: She’s persistent. She really wants to learn how to read. Maybe I don’t want to learn how to shoplift enough. I sigh and hand her the postcards that scattered on the ground. “You didn’t keep your postcards hidden in the warehouse.”

  She pulls out a squished box. “I took your box, too. Just in case, you know, we couldn’t get back in. We can read your letters later.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Okay, long a.” I write four-letter words on the paper.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Nicole and I read all night by the light of the only sputtering streetlamp in the alleyway. We read until my eyes are blurry, and we both fall asleep. Back-to-back we lean onto each other until a garbage truck rumbles up the alleyway—the urban equivalent of a rooster.

  I shake Nicole awake and go to Klon. His face burns with fever. He wakes with a start and shivers. “Klon, are you okay?” I can barely speak because of the fire in my throat. It’s like my tonsils grow bigger every day. I wish I had gotten them removed as a kid. It’s not like they do anything. I think that any structure of the human body that can be removed and not make a difference in the overall function of the body is obsolete. Like the coccyx and appendix—other totally useless parts of the human body that do nothing but cause pain. Stupid tonsils. I swallow hard and wish I had been the first to evolve into a non-tonsil human being. I tug on Klon’s coat. “Klon, we need to get someplace warm.”

  He stretches and stands just before the garbage men clomp down the alley.

  Nicole stands, and the three of us watch as other kids scramble out of their boxes and begin their day. What day is it? I wonder. I sometimes feel like all of time has been lost since we left Reno. I know it’s November.

  My tongue feels swollen; white clumps come dislodged from my throat, and I spit them out, wincing from the pain.

  New hypothesis: If I don’t treat my infected tonsils, the condition will get worse. If the tonsillitis gets worse, it can turn into quinsy. If I develop quinsy, then I will have to be hospitalized or could suffer a slow, painful death.

  Then I won’t have to worry about finding Aunt Sarah.

  I rub my throat.

  “It’s just a sore throat. Why are you so freaked out about it?” Nicole asks. “You’d think you had some kind of fatal disease or something.”

  Obviously, she hasn’t heard of quinsy. “Let’s go,” I say. I hope I don’t produce much spit today, because swallowing is a killer.

  “Where to?” Nicole says. “The world is ours.”

  Klon smiles. “Yeah. We can go anywhere.”

  If that’s true, how come I feel so trapped?

  “Main Street,” I finally say.

  “Main Street,” Nicole echoes. She looks nervous.

  “Okay!” says Klon, and croaks. As long as there’s road kill, he’ll be happy.

  “So?” I say.

  “So what?”

  “Are you gonna get our backpacks?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I’m not the one who hid them beside a dead body. And I don’t particularly want to go see it.”

  “Fine.” Nicole slips into the old building and comes out with our packs. I’d swear the sickly sweet smell of death has stuck to them. I gag.

  “Oh, please,” Nicole says. “Enough with the drama, okay?”

  We ask around. We’re not as far from Main Street as I thought. “Do you think,” I ask, “it would be better to leave our stuff here? Hidden? Ummm, to not look so, well—”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, homeless, I guess. She might be there, you know, at the restaurant, and showing up with backpacks and helpless puppy expressions could freak her out.”

  “What happened to ‘who gives a fuck about appearances’?”

  “This is different,” I say. Plus our backpacks smell like death. Really.

  Nicole mumbles something and says, “Okay. We hide them next to Limp. Just today.”

  “Just today.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  We weave through the streets of Boise. I cradle the box in my arm. It’s a really pretty city. It’d be a nice place to live. Then I stop the thought. Hope equals disappointment.

  We get lost about half a dozen times until we find Main Street. It wasn’t as close as everybody said. I pull out one of the check stubs. “Okay. We’re here. Now we just need to find the restaurant.”

  We stand and watch traffic whiz by. Klon, Nicole, and I look one way, then another. “Which way do we go?” Nicole asks.

  I turn right. “Let’s go up this way and come back down the other way. We’ll stop in all restaurants that have ‘Grill’ in the name. There should be nine, according to MapQuest.”

  “Good plan,” says Klondike. “Let’s go.” We almost bowl him over, though, because he’s crouched down to stare at a pigeon in the gutter.

  Nicole squints. “Look over there. That says—” She sounds out the letters. “Grill, something?”

  I look up. “You know,” I say, “I bet you need glasses.”

  “Do not.”

  “Tell me the letters.”

  Nicole squints. “Okay. I maybe need glasses.”

  “You can’t see anything,” I say.

  “Sure I can,” Nicole argues.

  Klon laughs. “How many fingers do I got up, Cappy?” His voice is hoarse and his croaks have become soft moans. He holds his side.

  “Ha. Ha.” Nicole says.

  “No wonder you never get your vowels right.” I sigh.

  Hypothesis: If I steal a pair of glasses at the drugstore for Nicole, she’ll be able to actually see the letters to read them.

  First, though, I have to steal.

  “So wha
t does it say?” Nicole asks.

  “Not Grill. Let’s go.”

  And we walk. And walk. Entering every single Grill restaurant on Main Street which happens to be, in my unscientific opinion, the longest, most awful street on the face of the planet. It’s late afternoon when we get to the last restaurant before we reach our starting point again.

  “C’mon, Jeops. This is the one. It has to be,” Nicole says. She smiles. “Really. Don’t look so down.”

  I force myself to swallow. We walk into the waiting lobby. Couples huddle together, dressed up, waiting to be called to their tables. Most of them have some kind of expensive-looking drink in their hands. Coffee-table books of the United States are displayed on a low, granite-topped table. Some people leaf through books while precariously balancing drinks. I cringe.

  “Pretty swank,” Nicole says. “This has got to be the place.”

  She and Klon sit in the corner. Several couples move away. I knew we should’ve washed up first. “Go on.” Nicole pulls out a photo book for her and Klon to look through.

  I take a deep breath and make my way toward the hostess. “Excuse me, could I please speak to a manager?”

  She looks at me above rimless glasses, pulls them off, setting them on her solid-wood podium, and not-discreetly-at-all covers her nose. “May I ask who you are?”

  You’re a stupid restaurant hostess. Get over yourself. That’s what I’d say in some get-gonads-and-speak-your-mind procedure. I’m going to do that. Make a procedure to follow to stand up to people—to tell people exactly what I think. That’s what Nicole and Klon do. I look back at them. They’re engrossed in a desert photo book.

  I stand up tall. “My name is Maya. Maya Aguirre. Um, I think my aunt works here. So can you please get the manager? It’s an emergency.”

  She hesitates, then turns on her heel and works her way through the crowded restaurant to talk to some guy in a suit. They dance around busy waiters, the manager schmoozing the customers. It feels like it takes them years to come back.

  Before he says anything, I pull out the check stub that has half disintegrated in my sweaty hand. “Um, is this check stub from this restaurant?” I show them. “I’m looking for a Sarah Jones.” I hold my breath, trying to peek behind them. Maybe she’s a chef. Maybe she’s a bartender. Maybe.